Born on January 4

659

Ali ibn Husayn Zayn al-Abidin
the fourth Shiite Imam, after his father Husayn, his uncle Hasan, and his grandfather Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law.
He survived the Battle of Karbala and was taken along with the enslaved women to the caliph in Damascus. Eventually, however, he was allowed to return to Medina where he led a secluded life with only a few intimate companions. Imam Sajjad's life and statements were entirely devoted to asceticism and religious teachings mostly in the form of invocations and supplications. His famous supplications are well known as Al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya

1076

Emperor Zhezong of Song
the seventh emperor of the Song Dynasty of China.
His personal name was Zhào Xù. He reigned from 1085 to 1100

1286

Anna Komnene Doukaina
Princess-consort of the Principality of Achaea in 1258–1278.

1334

Amadeus VI Count of Savoy
Count of Savoy from 1343 to 1383.
He was the eldest son of Aimone, Count of Savoy and Yolande of Montferrat

1338

Muhammed V of Granada
the eighth Nasrid ruler of the Moorish Emirate of Granada in Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula.

1581

James Ussher
Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656.
He was a prolific scholar, who most famously published a chronology that purported to establish the time and date of the creation as the night preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, according to the proleptic Julian calendar

1659

James Pierpont (minister)
credited with the founding of Yale University in the United States.
In 1701, Pierpont, a graduate of The Roxbury Latin School and Harvard University, secured the charter for The Collegiate School of Connecticut, which soon thereafter took the surname of its benefactor Elihu Yale

1664

Lars Roberg
a Swedish physician.

1672

Hugh Boulter
the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, the Primate of All Ireland, from 1724 until his death.
He also served as the chaplain to George I from 1719

Johann Friedrich Agricola
a German composer, organist, singer, pedagogue, and writer on music.
He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Flavio Anicio Olibrio

1729

Joachim Chreptowicz
a Polish-Lithuanian noble, poet, Grand Secretary of Lithuania, marshal of the Lithuanian Tribunal, Deputy and later last Grand Chancellor of Lithuania.
Member of the Permanent Council, activist of the Commission of National Education, physiocrat, supporter of Targowica Confederation

1731

Karl Abraham Zedlitz
a Prussian minister of education who was instrumental in establishing mandatory education in Prussia, which served as a model for the public education system in the United States.

1737

Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau
a French chemist and politician.
He is credited with producing the first systematic method of chemical nomenclature

1745

Johann Jakob Griesbach
born at Butzbach, a small town in the state of Hesse-Darmstadt, where his father, Konrad Kaspar , was pastor.
Griesbach's fame rests upon his work in New Testament criticism, in which he inaugurated a new epoch. His solution to the synoptic problem bears his name, but the Griesbach hypothesis has been modernly referred to as the Two-Gospel hypothesis

1746

Benjamin Rush
a Founding Father of the United States.
Rush was a civic leader in Philadelphia, where he was a physician, politician, social reformer, educator and humanitarian, as well as the founder of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

1747

Vivant Denon
a French artist, writer, diplomat, author, and archaeologist.
He was appointed as the first Director of the Louvre Museum by Napoleon after the Egyptian campaign of 1798-1801, and is commemorated in the Denon Wing of the modern museum. His two-volume Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte , was the foundation of modern Egyptology

1755

Louis Ramond de Carbonnières
a French politician, geologist and botanist.
He is regarded as one of the first explorers of the high mountains of the Pyrenees who can be described as a pyrénéiste

1772

Paul Louis Courier
born in Paris.

1772

Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut
a German jurist and musician.

1773

Johann Peter Heuschkel
a German oboist, organist, music teacher and composer.

1776

Bernardino Drovetti
an Italian diplomat, lawyer, explorer and antiquarian, appointed by Napoleon as French consul to Egypt at a time when the country and its antiquities were being opened rapidly to European knowledge and acquisition.
His methods were deplorable. If twenty alabaster vases were found in a tomb, he would see to it that half were smashed to bring up their price. He would break off the pyramidion off of an obelisk to make it easier to transport, etc. But statues of him were raised in his native Italy for services rendered in gathering together the magnificent works of Egyptian art and astonishingly beautiful papyri for Europe

1778

Franciszek Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki
an important Polish politician of the first half of the 19th century, prince and minister of the treasury in the Congress Kingdom of Poland.
He is known as one of the most prominent economists and financiers of his era

1778

Jean-Antoine Alavoine
a French architect best known for his column in the Place de la Bastille, Paris , the July Column to memorialize those fallen in the Revolution of 1830.
The column, consciously larger-scaled than the column in the Place Vendôme, has a capital freely based on the Corinthian order, with exaggerated corner volutes flanking putti holding swags, a complicated and somewhat incoherent design that found no imitators

1784

François Rude
a French sculptor.
He was the stepfather of Paul Cabet, a sculptor

1785

Jacob Grimm
a German philologist, jurist and mythologist.
He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law , the author of the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie and, more popularly, as one of the Brothers Grimm, as the editor of Grimm's Fairy Tales

1785

Friedrich Wilhelm Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg
the first Duke of the Second Line of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and founder of a line that includes the Royal Houses of Denmark, Greece, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

1789

Alphonse Henri d'Hautpoul
Prime Minister of France from 31 October 1849 to 10 April 1851 during the French Second Republic.

1797

Wilhelm Beer
a banker and astronomer from Berlin, Prussia, and the half-brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer.

1802

Paul 6th duc de Noailles
a French nobleman and historian.

1808

Friedrich Gottlob Haase
a German classical scholar.
He was born in Magdeburg on 4 January 1808

1809

Louis Braille
a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired.
His system remains known worldwide simply as braille

1811

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll
a French organ builder.
He has the reputation of being the most distinguished organ builder of the 19th century. He pioneered innovations in the art and science of organ building that permeated throughout the profession and influenced the course of organ building through the early twentieth century. The organ reform movement sought to return organ building to a more Baroque style, but in the last few decades of the twentieth century Cavaillé-Coll's designs came back into fashion. After Cavaillé-Coll's death, Charles Mutin maintained the business into the 20th century. Cavaillé-Coll was the author of many scientific journal articles and books on the organ in which he published the results of his researches and experiments. He was the inventor of several organ sounds/ranks/stops such as the flûte harmonique

1813

Louis Lucien Bonaparte
the third son of Napoleon's second surviving brother, Lucien Bonaparte.
He was born at Thorngrove, mansion in Grimley, Worcestershire, England, where his family were temporarily interned after having been captured by the British en route to America

1813

Baron Alexander von Bach
an Austrian politician.
His most notable achievement was instituting a system of centralized control at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria

1813

Isaac Pitman
an English teacher who developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known now as Pitman shorthand.
He first proposed this in Stenographic Soundhand in 1837. Pitman was a qualified teacher and taught at a private school he founded in Wotton-under-Edge - The British School, Wotton-under-Edge. He was also the vice president of the Vegetarian Society. Pitman was knighted in 1894

1822

Georg Büchmann
a German philologist.
He was born in Berlin, and died there in Schöneberg

1823

Peter Joseph Osterhaus
Union Army General in the American Civil War and later served as a diplomat.

1824

Peter Mitchell (politician)
a Canadian politician and one of the Fathers of Confederation.

1832

George Tryon
a British admiral who died when his flagship HMS Victoria collided with HMS Camperdown during manoeuvres off Tripoli, Lebanon.

1836

Princess Anna of Saxony (1836–1859)
the seventh child and fourth eldest daughter of John of Saxony and his wife Amalie Auguste of Bavaria and a younger sister of Albert of Saxony and George of Saxony.
Through her marriage to Archduke Ferdinand, Hereditary Prince of Tuscany, Anna was a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and an Archduchess and Princess of Austria and Princess of Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, and Tuscany. Ann died shortly before her husband succeeded his father as Grand Duke of Tuscany

1837

Pavlo Zhytetsky
a Ukrainian linguist, philologist, ethnographer and literary historian.
He was a member of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society , the Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler , the Shevchenko Scientific Society , and the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences , he became the first honorary member of that society in 1908

1838

General Tom Thumb
the stage name of Charles Sherwood Stratton , a little person who achieved great fame as a midget performer under circus pioneer P.T.
Barnum

1839

Casimiro de Abreu
a Brazilian poet, novelist and playwright, adept of the "Ultra-Romanticism" movement.
He is famous for the poem "Meus oito anos"

1839

Carl Humann
a German engineer, architect and archaeologist.
He discovered the Pergamon Altar

1844

Julius Zupitza
a German philologist and one of the founders of English Studies.

1845

Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko
a Russian writer, essayist, journalist, memoirist, and the brother of famous theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, the most prolific Russian Empire writer of the late 19th-early 20th century, published more than 250 books; he was widely popular among the general reading public, but had little success with mainstream critics

1848

Heinrich Suter
a historian of science specializing in Islamic mathematics and astronomy.

1848

Katsura Tarō
a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, politician and three-time Prime Minister of Japan.

1850

Max Kalbeck
a German writer, critic and translator.
He became one of the most influential critics in Austria and was bitterly opposed to the music of Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf